I grew up in poverty and adversity. At fourteen, a racist attack left me with a fractured skull and a scar that still reminds me where I began. But I learned early that where you begin does not have to determine who you become.

When I was young, words from Malcolm X stayed with me: “A man who stands for nothing falls for anything.” They made me think about identity — not the identity other people give us, but the one we actually live.

For more than five decades, I have worked in movement, rehabilitation, education, business and writing. I have worked with world champions and people learning to walk again. With schools, businesses, communities and families.

And I am still curious.

Not about staying young. I have already been young.

I am interested in what makes us remain participants in our own lives.

We live in a strange time. We have never had more opportunity to show the world who we are, yet perhaps we have never spent so much time constructing a version of ourselves for other people to see.

The photograph. The post. The workout. The meal. The holiday. The achievement.

Experience becomes content. Living becomes broadcasting. Somewhere in the process, being can become performance.

I resist that.

Not because social media is inherently bad, but because the life has to matter more than the image of the life.

Ageing presents another version of the same problem. Society has an image waiting for us: what someone at a particular age should look like, wear, want, attempt, stop doing and eventually become.

I resist that too.

Meta-Age grew from that understanding. It is not another fitness programme, longevity trend or attempt to stay young. It asks something more fundamental:

Are you still in your life?

Identity shapes behaviour. It influences how we move, what we attempt, who we connect with, whether we remain curious and whether we continue to contribute.

I move because movement remains part of who I am. I work because I still have work worth doing. I create because I am still curious.

And I do not need to turn every moment into evidence that I am living.

Participation is not documentation.

Experience is not content.

Living is not broadcasting.

Don’t perform a life.

Live one.

That is Meta-Age.

Participation over withdrawal.

I’M IN.